In all of my professional work experiences, I’ve had two stints outside of academia and more traditional nonprofit settings in which I worked with high school students. One was during my two summers as a consultant with the Junior Statesmen Foundation, where I co-taught and co-prepared an accelerated version of AP US History for students attending the JSA summer program that Princeton University hosted, in 2008 and 2009. I loved those summers with those students, even though it meant not seeing my family for a few weeks at a time.

The other one was during my time as Director of Curriculum for Presidential Classroom. Presidential Classroom, by the way, was never affiliated with the White House. Nor was it an actual classroom. From 1968 to 2011, it was a civic education program that made money by getting schools and parents to cough off dollars to send their high school kids to Washington, DC for a week. Presidential Classroom’s purpose was for students to learn about how the center of American power works from an up-close-and-personal perspective, to serve as a possible way to inspire teenagers to take up public service as adults. It was so influenced by the exaggerated sense Baby Boomers had of themselves and of their activism that was “the ’60s.”

Except that by the time I came on board as a staff person, those lofty purposes were no longer Presidential Classroom’s raison d’être. Like any small nonprofit, it was trying to make more money and compete successfully in a crowded market. Close Up had caught up with and surpassed the organization ten years before I accepted the position. As my one-time boss reminded our staff of twelve continuously, Close Up cleared 20,000 students through their programs in DC every year, while Presidential Classroom struggled to attract 4,000 students in its programs. The board of directors had decided a few years before my time at Presidential Classroom that the organization’s programming had to be more entertaining, and not just about being on Capitol Hill or asking undersecretaries of state and education cogent policy questions.

Outlook 2001, my second and last time on the Presidential Classroom annual resource guide, December 1, 2000. (Donald Earl Collins).

Across two summer cycles and one winter/spring cycle between June 1999 and December 2000, I worked with high school juniors and seniors as part of what I called “edutainment.” I held up the education end. One of my main jobs before groups of 300-400 students arrived for their week of civic education was to revise the organization’s resource book Outlook. It was my job to cover the various ideological and policy topics of the day using primary and secondary sources in the resource book. Even though the organization only expected me to cover two sides to any policy-based issue or political perspective, I knew that this was too simplistic. I often had three points of view for each topic in the resource book.

It was all to make sure that when the high school students got together to debate each other on immigration reform, reproductive rights, affirmative action, or climate change, they didn’t sound like they just quoted Jack Van Impe or Jimmy Swaggart. It was supposed to help them ask well-thought out questions when meeting with representatives and senators, or during a Q-and-A session with a cabinet member, senior Pentagon official, or an editor from The Washington Post or USA Today.

Unfortunately, what little bit of learning students gained during their week in DC translated into a confirmation of their existing ideas about American politics and civic engagement. Plus, it didn’t help that I was working for Presidential Classroom at the end of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment debacle and throughout the 2000 Presidential Election cycle. Arguments about the articles of impeachment turned into whether Monica Lewinsky seduced Clinton or whether the president used his power to obtain sexual favors from a then-twenty-three year-old intern. Six-year-old Elián González became either a proverbial poster child for “illegals” or a symbol of America’s broken promise as a melting pot. Every White student had a story about their dad or brother being screwed out of a job because of affirmative action, of course without actual evidence.

As for the three branches of government, checks and balances, and the bicameral chamber, or more importantly, the process of how a bill became law, who really cared? The students and some staff were more interested in comedy troupes in Georgetown or attracting more “Orientals” to program than in the distance between how government in DC was supposed to work and the Hill’s sorry-ass reality.

What remains of Presidential Classroom, a broken link on the Miller Center website, February 22, 2017. (Donald Earl Collins).

As hard and difficult as that job was at the turn of the twenty-first century, it would be impossible now. There’s absolutely no way I could do that Presidential Classroom job in the era of 45. I couldn’t keep a straight face while discussing meritocracy, the distinctions between the Democratic and Republican parties, or in believing that we were really exposing high school juniors and seniors to how Washington actually works. In order to do a proper debate, each group of high school students we had back then would need the full week to just focus on learning how to debate, forget about meeting folks on the Hill or engaging appointees in Q-and-A sessions. We’d have to take away their smartphones and cut off their access to wi-fi and TV to get them to concentrate. Most of all, how could I, how could any of us, have explained the ascendancy of 45 to the presidency without hundreds of center-right parents calling us for weeks afterward complaining about how often we brought American racism to John and Becky’s attention?

If Presidential Classroom existed in 2017, and I found myself unlucky enough to be its executive director, I would forever refocus it away from Capitol Hill. I would have students meet up with policy analysts and lobbyists from K Street, Northwest and the Massachusetts Avenue corridor between D Street, Northeast (the National Republican Committee and the Heritage Foundation) and 18th Street, Northwest (where the American Enterprise Institute, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Johns Hopkins SAIS are located). I would bring in journalists from across the center-right ideological spectrum. But only after I got the so-called liberal ones to admit that their first duty is to sell a story, not objectivity and certainly not truth, and with that, exposing their center-right perspective.

Most of all, I’d show them the rest of DC. The parts of the area that have gentrified in the past twenty years. The parts of Wards 7 and 8 that have concentrated poverty and the ills that result from it. I would introduce them to the nonprofit and social justice organizations that truly give a shit about neighborhood displacement and homelessness, mass incarceration, and political corruption. In all of this, I would want the students to see not only how DC really works, but what good people who care about civic participation and public service must do to put a dent into this out-of-control, money-drenched machine.

This is a subject matter that normally would be too complicated for me to write about here. But then again, the work of explaining any aspect of the human condition is complex work. Especially when addressing American racism, its origins, its subatomic parts, and its effect on humans beyond the material and physical. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Maya Angelou, bell hooks, and so many others have described the Black body and what the Black body has had to endure at the hands of American racism. But perhaps one of the most serious effort to address the psychological impact of American racism on Blacks and Whites was W. E. B. Du Bois’ in Black Reconstruction(1935). It’s a book that is the very definition of tome, covering twenty years of history with a sociological lens determined to cut to the marrow of what occurred during Reconstruction as if the reader was an eyewitness to each day’s happenings between 1860 and 1880.

Thanks in varying measures to Derrick Bell, David Roediger, Patricia Hill Collins, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Michael Eric Dyson, and many, many others, intellectuals and scholars have made much progress with the oft-quoted phrase “the wages of whiteness” over the past quarter-century. But while many have explained the wages of Whiteness, most haven’t tried to define it, especially when it comes to the psychological.

For a refresher, this was what Du Bois actually wrote about Whiteness and wages in Black Reconstruction:

“A sort of public and psychological wage,” Du Bois wrote on page 700. Most scholars have explained rather thoroughly the public or material wages of Whiteness, of American racism for Whites on a structural and institutional level. Many have attempted to do so on an individual or internalizing level. But Du Bois was one of a handful who attempted to explain both the collective and individual impetus for being comfortable in racism. A founding member of the field of American sociology, an expert American and Black historian, Du Bois in 1935 discussed with great explanatory power the nature of American racism and how it developed over time to trump class divides.

But this only gets at the material. As for the psychological, Du Bois spent a significant amount of his 760 pages in Black Reconstruction attempting to do so. Except that, as a sociologist, Du Bois explained the psychological wage primarily in terms of group and interpersonal dynamics, and not in terms of group thought or a sort of collective thought.

On page 52, though, Du Bois hits home with the following about American racism’s corrosive effect on those practicing it at the individual level:

What Du Bois described in 1935 was not just the effect of American racism on the individual Southern planter. If Du Bois had possessed a copy of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-V), what he described we would call narcissistic personality disorder in 2016. Phrases like “inflate the ego…beyond all reason,” “arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets,” “expected deference and self-abasement,” and “were choleric and easily insulted.” These could easily be “a persistent manner of grandiosity, a continuous desire for admiration, along with a lack of empathy,” the DSM-V general description of narcissism.

A couple of quotes and a general description of narcissism are likely insufficient to link Du Bois’ prescient nod to social psychology on the issue of American racism. This is what the DSM-V says about narcissistic personality disorder in full:

In order to determine if a patient may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD), a psychiatrist must determine if that patient meets at least any five (5) of the nine (9) standards below:

A grandiose logic of self-importance

A fixation with fantasies of unlimited success, control, brilliance, beauty, or idyllic love

A credence that he or she is extraordinary and exceptional and can only be understood by, or should connect with, other extraordinary or important people or institutions

A desire for unwarranted admiration

A sense of entitlement

Interpersonally oppressive behavior

No form of empathy

Resentment of others or a conviction that others are resentful of him or her

A display of egotistical and conceited behaviors or attitudes

(American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

Now there are actually far more serious personality disorders that can be part of a larger set of self-destructive, dangerous, or even lethal behaviors, in which narcissistic personality disorder can be entangled. Most individuals with narcissistic personality disorder are not dangerous or self-destructive, and often function as normal human beings. In other words, there are levels of narcissism here, from the ground floor to the edges of the known universe.

Ah, but the DSM-V is describing the behavior of individuals, and not that of a class of people or a society, like what Du Bois attempted to do in Black Reconstruction, right? Yes and no. Du Bois used one individual example after another to build the case that the “white laborer” had come to have the same aspirations for the “public and psychological wages” that the Southern planter class had obtained through generations of owning slaves. Only, Blacks by the time of Reconstruction were slaves no more. The best way for Southern White elites to provide poor Whites all of the amenities of American racism without the latter either revolting against them outright or joining up with Blacks to fight grinding poverty was to codify American racism in the form of Jim Crow.

But where I and Du Bois are not on the same page is in the nature of American racism and narcissism as variables. Du Bois essentially argued that the psychological wage of Whiteness was the effect of American racism on Whites over time. The problem is, where does American racism come out of psychologically and sociologically? The simple yet true answer is out of gaming an advantage through greed and the desire for profit, through fear and the disdain for those whom have been deemed lesser, and through a willful ignorance and ignoring of the condition in which one has left other human beings. And that, for those who are reading, is both racism and narcissism, two separate yet interdependent ideas that help to prop each other up.

Before digging deeper into this, there are two things I want to make clear. One is that to think about American racism and American narcissism as part of the collective culture, think first of an atom. If racism were an atom, narcissism is its neutron. An atom doesn’t necessarily need a neutron to be stable (think Hydrogen atom, for example), and neutrons can be used to split atoms. People can be individually or collectively racist without necessarily being narcissistic, in other words, but the two often go hand-in-hand. Or, one can think about racism as the result of the social construction of race (to slightly quote Barbara Jean Fields), while narcissism is a psychological construction from which socially-constructed racism can spring, and then the former can be reinforced by the latter.

However, do not get it twisted. Just because I am saying that narcissism is a part of racism and vice-versa does not make racism a psychological illness by any means. That narcissists often function normally in nearly all social settings means that the personality disorder is a flaw or weakness of the human condition, not a disease. Racism is the attempt to take as much advantage of this flaw for oneself or for one’s group as better than others, and then use that success to reinforce the belief that one person or one group is better than another by taking even more advantages, materially and otherwise. American racism and American narcissism are two bosom buddies, and intertwine and intermix much more freely in the American context than virtually anywhere else.

There's also a Kindle edition on Amazon.com. The enhanced edition can be read only with Kindle Fire, an iPad or a full-color tablet. The links to the enhanced edition through Apple's iBookstore and the Barnes & Noble NOOK edition are below. The link to the Amazon Kindle version is also immediately below: